Jul 6, 2006

Increasing traffic to your site is hard work. First off you have to provide good content. This should be your foremost goal, and you do this by posting, posting and posting. Fresh interesting content will bring your readers back for more.

Once a visitor arrives at your site, make it easy for them to come back. Provide them with a RSS feed they can subscribe to with Feedburner. Display the feed on your site in a prominent location. Give them the option to receive updates to your site via e-mail with Feedblitz . Offer button subscriptions to news aggregators like you see in Blogatech's sidebar as well. Remind your visitors to bookmark your site, I don't know how many times I've lost a site I was interested in because I didn't bookmark it. Also, if your using click exchanges to promote your site, and you should be, give those visitors your full URL address.(ie http://blogatech.blogspot.com) Click exchanges run in a separate frame and your address doesn't display in the address bar. If someone want to bookmark your site and all they see is Joe Blow's Blog with no address, it can be a pain to track your site down and mark it.

Optimizing your site to increase your search engine ranking is priority number two. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complicated science that is ever changing. Primarily it involves creating keywords that are closely associated with all aspects of your content, such as titles, alt tags for your images, word density and more. Spend some time and research the topic. Create good meta tags, description and keywords. Make gradual changes and track your results with Site Meter or Stat Tracker. SEO takes time but will pay off greatly if you put forth the effort. (read more on SEO)

Your next priorty should be getting linked. Links to your website are like flyers in store windows or ads placed in a magazine. They are the internet's form of advertising and for the most part are free. Obviously, If people don't know your site exists your not going to get hits. The more links you can get the better. Links are also a big part of SEO and getting high page level search engine results. Take advantage of any link opportunity that you run across, it's like handing out a business card. If you look around you can find site like http://getalink.blogspot.com or http://bestestblogofalltime.blogspot.com which exist solely to help promote your site with a link.

Blog directories are another way to get linked. Register with as many as you can find. (see list of directories in sidebar) Another type of directory I've seen lately are the ones that rank your site based on how many hits or votes it receives and displays your banner if your in the top percentile. blogelites.com and topblogs.blogadvance.com are a couple of examples. Your going to see a lot of these type of sites popping up as the software needed to host one of these sites is provided free from Aardvark Top Sites

Spend time posting at forums and leaving comments on blogs. Most forums will let you add a link to your site in your signature if your helping them add quality content and not just spamming . The same goes for commenting on blogs. If you like a blog or a particular post, leave a encouraging comment, or even create a post about the subject and track back. You should be tagging your posts for Technorati also. (read more about Technorati)

Incorporate all these methods in your site promotion strategy and employ patience. I think you will be surprised at how they have a snowball effect and how fast your traffic will increase.